Words Into Action

by William Gaskill

  Later, Andrew Aguecheek overhears Viola talking to Olivia:

  VIOLA. Most excellent accomplished lady, the heavens rain odours on you.

  SIR ANDREW. That youth’s a rare courtier: ‘rain odours’, well.

  VIOLA. My matter hath no voice, lady, but to your own pregnant and vouchsafed ear.

  SIR ANDREW. ‘Odours’, ‘pregnant’ and ‘vouchsafed’; I’ll get ’em all three already.

  We know that Viola’s choice of words is not from the heart, but they do have a certain splendour. At least Sir Andrew thinks so.

  When Polonius reads Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia aloud, he comments on it:

  ‘To the celestial and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia—’

  That’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase; beautified is a vile phrase.

  and we are surely meant to agree that ‘beautified Ophelia’ is artificial, just as we think it’s typical of Polonius to repeat ‘a vile phrase’. He then reads this poem:

  ‘Doubt thou the stars are fire,

  Doubt that the sun doth move;

  Doubt truth to be a liar,

  But never doubt I love.’

  which is as cheap a piece of doggerel as you are likely to get. We know that Hamlet in his daily speech makes better verse than that. Its very badness calls in doubt the depth of his feelings about Ophelia. In the graveyard scene he says:

  I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers

  Could not, with all their quantity of love,

  Make up my sum.

  But we are sceptical. Shakespeare has left it rather late in the day, and the words do not ring true.

  In the middle of the ‘rogue and peasant slave’ soliloquy after the ‘bloody, bawdy villain’ outburst, Hamlet stops and describes his own language:

  Why, what an ass am I? Ay, sure, this is most brave,

  That I, the son of the dear murderèd,

  Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

  Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words

  And fall a-cursing like a very drab,

  A scullion.

  Using too many adjectives, particularly if they are alliterative—‘bloody, bawdy’—or rhyming—‘treacherous, lecherous’—is fit only for servants and prostitutes. ‘I will show how down-to-earth and purposeful I am by very common language: ‘whore’, ‘drab’, ‘scullion’. But we should not fall into the trap of believing, as George Orwell did, that all polysyllables are bad and all monosyllables good. (It’s no more true than that all polysyllables are of Latin origin and all monosyllables of Anglo-Saxon.) After the murder of Duncan, Macbeth says:

  Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

  Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

  The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

  Making the green one red.

  The two rolling polysyllables are extravagantly baroque compared with the simple ‘blood’, ‘hand’, ‘clean’, ‘green’, ‘red’, but the contrast is surely intended, and it works. However, by the end of the banquet scene, the monosyllables have won the day:

  It will have blood, they say. Blood will have blood.

  Sometimes Shakespeare is in the business of literary criticism. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was the great success of the rival theatre company. Its hero shouts as he enters the stage in a chariot drawn by the Kings of Trebizon and Soria, with bits in their mouths.

  Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!

  What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day,

  And have so proud a chariot at your heels,

  And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine?

  By the time Shakespeare wrote the second part of Henry IV this kind of rhetoric has become the rant of the braggart Pistol, in a tavern brawl with a whore.

  Shall pack-horses

  And hollow pampered jades of Asia,

  Which cannot go but thirty miles a day,

  Compare with Caesar and with cannibals,

  And Trojan Greeks?

  Nay, rather damn them with King Cerberus,

  And let the welkin roar.

  This is not just the creation of a comic character but a questioning of heroic writing and perhaps heroism itself.

  Most wonderful of all is the writing of Falstaff, in the first part of the same play in which he impersonates first the King, Hal’s father, and then Hal himself. Mistress Quickly is laughing so much that she cries and Falstaff says:

  Weep not, sweet Queen, for trickling tears are vain.

  Quickly recognises an end-stopped iambic pentameter when she hears it and laughs more. Falstaff caps it with:

  For God’s sake, lords, convey my tristful Queen

  For tears do stop the floodgates of her eyes.

  The writer is saying, ‘I can write like that, but isn’t it ridiculous?’ This ironic critique of language has the same effect as the alternation of verse and prose. The heroic is under-cut by the prosaic. The relation between the two suggests a synthesis.

  Iago speaks in prose in his scenes with Roderigo and in an undecorated verse with Othello; Othello restrains his imagery when he is performing before his white masters but the language becomes richer as the emotions take over. When Iago has succeeded in setting the jealousy in motion he takes over the exotic style. It is as if he actually possesses Othello, or is possessed by him.

  Not poppy nor mandragora,

  Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,

  Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep

  Which thou owedst yesterday.

  (Othello 3.3)

  The examples multiply. The use of language is always for dramatic or comic effect, never for beauty. They are markings for the actor.

  14

  Verse and Prose—Hamlet Again

  A well-known dramatic critic said of a production of Much Ado About Nothing that the verse-speaking was poor, unaware that half the play was written in prose. Some actors believe that to play Shakespeare you have to learn to speak verse, assuming that all Shakespeare is written in verse. If they think about prose at all they would be surprised, like Molière’s M. Jourdain, to find that they were speaking it all time. Prose is everyday speech and there is some magic device by which language is ‘heightened’ to become poetry. Poetry is different. The opposite tendency in verse-speaking today is to reverse the process and make poetry sound as much like ordinary speech as possible. It must be made ‘real’. Well, some poetry sounds like ordinary speech anyway.

  T.S. Eliot wrote about the first scene in Hamlet :

  The first twenty-two lines are built of the simplest words in the most homely idiom… No poet has begun to master dramatic verse until he has begun to write lines which, like these in Hamlet, are transparent. You are consciously attending not to the poetry, but to the meaning of the poetry. If you were hearing Hamlet for the first time, without knowing anything about the play, I do not think it would occur to you to ask whether the speakers were speaking in verse or prose.

  (Poetry and Drama)

  Eliot was determined to rediscover the secret of dramatic writing for his own time. All previous poets, particularly those in the nineteenth century, had failed disastrously in their use of blank verse. All poets dream of rediscovering the secret of dramatic verse. Eliot came very near to understanding the problem. Unfortunately his own search for a dramatic transparency resulted in verse plays which are unimaginative and unpoetic. His later plays from The Cocktail Party onwards would have been better written in lively prose.

  Unrhymed blank verse can be just an aid to speaking quickly and is not necessarily more poetic than any other form of writing. Prose can be imaginative and verse can be pedestrian. Both can be rhythmic and both can be rhetorical. An actor must learn to speak both and see them as equally expressive. In the melting pot of Shakespeare’s experiment with theatre language they coexisted and were used at will. Is it beautiful poetry or elegant prose? Shakespeare didn’t care. He probably never thought of his plays as literature; they only became so after his de
ath. It was the actors who were ‘the abstract and brief chronicles of the time’, not the writer; a list of their names, including Shakespeare’s, appears at the front of the First Folio. We are led by the inescapable fact that our greatest poet chose to write plays. That is, if he is our greatest poet. Would he still be thought so if he had only written the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece? Probably not.

  There is a pernicious habit of using the Sonnets as the starting point for actors speaking Shakespeare. But an actor needs to feel that something is happening dramatically through the language, and the Sonnets, by their nature, are not dynamic, they do not move. The poet is at a point in time. He looks at his experience and how he got there. Shakespeare’s sonnets are about his personal life but they do not embody it. The subject of a tired ageing man working himself up over a good-looking boy is more successfully dramatised in the relation of Falstaff and Prince Hal in the two parts of Henry IV.

  As a general rule in sixteenth-century drama, prose is more often used by lower classes, comics, madmen; verse by the nobility. Shakespeare as always started to break the rules.

  Peter Hall sees it differently:

  It is always a shock to realise that Shakespeare’s verse is his quickest and leanest means of communication. His verse does not represent ‘poetics’. It is not poetry: for him it is the equivalent of ordinary speech. Artificiality is expressed by prose—it is always more formal, antithetical and ornate. The prose may also be the wrong-headed colloquialisms of Bottom and Dogberry as they strive for educated speech. But it can as well express the pretentious thought patterns of Don Armado. It is never natural speech: it is artificial. Natural speech is portrayed by the verse—economical, fleet, often using the simplest of words…

  (Exposed by the Mask)

  In his desire to insist on the naturalness of verse Hall goes too far. Bottom and Dogberry are in prose because they are meant to be funny, and it is easier to be funny in prose. But there are plenty of examples of fluent prose and clunking verse. Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is a man’ is in prose. It is never ‘formal, antithetical or ornate’; its language is simple and direct. Nor is verse always leaner. There is no rule of thumb. All the writing is meant to sound like people talking to each other, though I doubt whether Shakespeare, or his audience, ever thought it was the ‘equivalent of ordinary speech’, a concept of a more democratic age.

  By the time of Hamlet, whose central character may or may not be mad, but anyway is pretending to be, the divisions are breaking down. He speaks both verse and prose. A noble character who is also mad. In what form should he express himself? In one scene alone, the arrival of the Players, we are taken through a variety of prose and verse. The scene starts with Hamlet baiting Polonius in prose; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive and the prose continues, very down-to-earth, fast, clever undergraduate chat. Hamlet, still talking prose, attempts to explain his melancholy:

  What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

  The Players arrive and speak prose but are coaxed, without too much difficulty, into giving us ‘a taste of their quality’ in conventional blank verse, in a speech from a play about the Trojan War. We can tell it’s old-fashioned because it doesn’t sound like anything we have heard so far:

  The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,

  Black as his purpose, did the night resemble

  When he lay couchèd in th’ ominous horse

  Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared

  With heraldry more dismal. Head to foot

  Now is he total gules, horridly tricked

  With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,

  Baked and impasted with the parching streets

  That lend a tyrannous and damnèd light

  To their lord’s murder.

  The words thud down in regular iambics, and the lines do not flow one into another but in their own way are effective. The speech uses a sustained metaphor from heraldry and works it through to excess: ‘Head to foot now is he total gules’ has a kind of splendid baroque flourish which verges on the comic. Yet Hamlet speaks it with relish and earlier has praised the writer as being free from affectation and for a specialised taste, with scenes ‘set down with as much modesty as cunning’. Can he be serious? Perhaps Shakespeare/ Hamlet secretly wanted to write in this style but had a more complex and searching task. After the Players leave there is a brief bridge of:

  Ay, so God bye to you. Now I am alone.

  before he launches into:

  O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I

  —vivid, exaggerated but passionate verse quite unlike the majestic controlled writing of the ‘rugged Pyrrhus’. But it too has its excesses:

  Bloody, bawdy villain!

  Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

  O vengeance!

  But as we saw earlier, Hamlet stops himself and criticises his own style and diction. The scene ends in a simple couplet:

  The play’s the thing

  Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

  Later in the play, while the actors prepare to stage The Murder of Gonzago, Hamlet, in his very colloquial prose, tells them how to act. When the play itself begins we might expect something not unlike the ‘rugged Pyrrhus’, with Hamlet’s interpolation, perhaps played in the style dictated by Hamlet in his advice. Do we get it? No, we are given something naive in rhyming couplets, more like a mummers’ play.

  Full thirty times hath Phoebus’ cart gone round

  Neptune’s salt wash and Tellus’ orbèd ground

  And thirty dozen moons with borrowed sheen

  About the world have times twelve thirties been…

  In fact we never know which bit, if any, is Hamlet’s interpolation.

  When the play explodes the situation and Claudius leaves, Hamlet’s language disintegrates as a means of coherent communication.

  Why let the stricken deer go weep

  The hart ungallèd play

  For some must watch while some must sleep

  So runs the world away.

  No one, least of all Hamlet, knows what it means. Poetry becomes meaningless doggerel. We are watching a kind of breakdown. The success of his plan to unmask the King has left him with real responsibility for his action, and he cannot face it. The personality starts to crumble with the writing. Coherence returns in the scene of prose dialogue with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about the recorders. It is a scene of breathtaking speed. The wit which had formerly been a protection is now an aggressive weapon. But the transition to wit at a moment when action should follow is an evasion. Hamlet is left alone, and we are plunged into crude melodramatic verse which bears no relation to what has gone before:

  ’Tis now the very witching time of night

  When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out

  Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood

  And do such bitter business as the day

  Would quake to look on.

  Who does he think he is kidding? This is bad, over-the-top rant and the writer knows it. Hamlet is a long way from drinking hot blood, and the only bitter business is giving his mother a telling-off, not killing his murdering uncle.

  Throughout the play Hamlet’s poetry and prose keep changing and, like Macbeth, the style towards the end becomes simpler and less hysterical with the character’s resignation and acceptance of death. The writing is indicative of inner psychology without its being directly expressed. Poetry in the theatre is the resonance that takes us outside the particular predicament of the character to relate it to larger issues, the natural world, to society as a whole, and in so doing makes us look at the character from the outside
.

  It can also give the actor some awareness of the existence of his part beyond personal psychology. Most of the above is routine literary criticism, but of what use is it to the actor? Many actors think that everything they speak is an expression of what their characters think and feel—and, in a sense, it is. But being aware that a passage is more overblown or exaggerated will give an insight into the character as seen from the outside. An actor can criticise or comment on his character without losing his identity in the action. This is key for his understanding. Some actors think that all they need to do is feel, and the words will look after themselves. There is an equally false belief that the words will do it all for you. Words have to be allowed to do their work, but they must seem to come from the character and situation. It’s difficult with an old play where all the language may seem strange and artificial, but it’s a director’s job, as far as he or she can, to help the actor to understand what might have been near conversational in its own period and what would have sounded artificial.

  Any tips for the actor? Don’t be overawed by the text but look at it carefully on the page. The only real difference between verse and prose is that one is laid out in lines and the other isn’t. Try and see the shape of the speech and how it might affect your speaking. Only by speaking aloud will you feel the stress and rhythm of the writing, whether in verse or prose. I deal with this in a later chapter.

  15

  The Words of Puritans—Shaw and Bunyan

  Shakespeare had little of the puritan in him, either morally or linguistically, though in Malvolio he draws a not entirely unsympathetic picture of one. But the killjoy nature of puritanism is fixed for all time by this:

  SIR TOBY (to MALVOLIO). Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?

  FESTE. Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot in the mouth too.

  George Bernard Shaw, a self-confessed puritan, knew Shakespeare inside out but professed to despise him for portraying worthless, reactionary, non-visionary people who would never change the world. He compares him unfavourably to Bunyan as a stylist.

  Even in mere technical adaptation to the art of the actor, Bunyan’s dramatic speeches are as good as Shakespeare’s tirades. Only a trained dramatic speaker can appreciate the terse manageableness and effectiveness of such a speech as this… ‘By this I perceive thou art one of my subjects; for all that country is mine, and I am the Prince and the God of it. How is it then that thou hast run away from thy King? Were it not that I hope thou mayst do me more service, I would strike thee now at one blow to the ground.’ Here there is no raving and swearing and rhyming and classical allusion. The sentences go straight to their mark; and their concluding phrases soar like the sunrise, or swing and drop like a hammer, just as the actor wants them.